How to professionally use your smartphone’s camera features

A camera is to a photographer what a brush is to a painter, a tool. You are young, talented, and passionate about photography, a camera, or its lack, limits your desire to express this creativity. Here is a question, do you have a smartphone? does it have a camera?

Your smartphone may not be top of the range, it may be middle range or low range; the truth is, it doesn't really matter; your smartphone’s camera can still capture creative, dreamy, emotive and vivid photos.

Smartphone cameras now come loaded with powerful - soon to be basic - features as we saw in the last article - Five Smartphone Camera Features to help you Shoot Stunning Photos.

True Photography is telling a story, your camera is to you what a pen is to a writer, weave the drama, mood and feel of your subject through excellent composition. Knowing the features of your camera can limit or explode your abilities.

In this article we delve deeper on how to professionally use features found on your smartphone camera and capture award winning photos.

HDR and Exposure

ISO Sensitivity

Resolution and Zoom

Burst mode and Timer

Grid Lines

HDR and Exposure

Landscapes, sunlight portraits, low light; this are some situations when using HDR (High Dynamic Range) will help you shoot a perfect photo.

When to Use HDR

Capturing extreme contrast; a deep blue sky, a scorched earth, with a mix of green foliage,may stretch the limits of your smartphone camera. Enable HDR; HDR will balance the sky and landscape, the sky won’t be too blown out and the earth won’t be too dark..

Creative photography is painting with light, harsh sunlight causes glares and dark shadows, HDR takes care of both the light in background and foreground, it brightens the foreground without washing out clearly lit spots, capturing a vivid, crisp image.

Your smartphone camera’s flash when used in low light has a limited reach.HDR works better, it will capture shadows, highlight details that may otherwise disappear.

When Not to Use HDR

When your subject is in motion, HDR may fail you, it will blur the image.

When trying to capture a silhouette while creating a deep contrast between the background and foreground.

When shooting an array of rich colors, for example multicoloured flowers in bloom, the color intensity may be washed out.

Exposure

Choose Phase Detection Autofocus over contrast detection. It's better and faster, takes about 0.3 of a second to focus on your subject.

Your smartphone camera is limited on the control of shutter speed and aperture, you gain your ‘stops’ control by adjusting Exposure value (EV) in your settings.

To brighten your image slide EV towards the positive (+) sign.

To darken your image slide EV towards the negative (-) sign.

Take note, extreme movements will increase noise in your image.

In low light or if your subject is moving bump up the ISO, you will capture smooth images with less noise.

Resolution and Zoom

Where will the image you capture be used? Your answer to this question determines which resolution to use.

High resolution gives sharper images when blown up, the downside is that your image comes loaded with high megapixels.

Pixel size matters: Megapixels determine your camera’s capabilities; each pixel captures light from the subject. A larger pixel size in your smartphone allows more light into the sensor, The larger the pixel size, the larger the overall sensor and the better the general capabilities of your smartphone camera.

Low resolution on the other hand will produce a grainy image when put on a large screen.

Assume you are shooting a bird in the sky using your smartphone camera, your interest is the bird and not the sky, unlike a DSLR you cannot adjust your settings and make the bird your focal point, to take care of this your smartphone camera is equipped with a digital zoom, an equivalent of zooming in by cropping a higher megapixel photo down to a lower megapixel equivalent.

For example when using a 16MP camera in order to leave out unnecessary details you can use digital zoom to effectively bring the pixels down to 6MP or crop it even closer to 3MP this will get you a closer shot of the bird without compromising the quality of your image.

Lastly, Zooming into your subject compromises the quality of your image it is better to move closer to your subject.

Burst mode and Timer

Burst Mode shoots several photos of your subject from which you can select a crisp and clear image.

When shooting close up photography burst mode and self timer can be used to reduce the chances of camera shake which may spoil your shot in low light.

Set your Timer to capture a group photo or self portrait.

Grid Lines

The rule of thirds - the process of placing two equally spaced vertical and horizontal lines across the photo creating nine squares- when applied correctly will help you position different elements in the same photo.

Your smartphone camera comes with grid lines use them to apply this all important photographic rule.

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